Many computer system users are turning to a pay-per-use concept in which the user is billed based on some measure of processor utilization within the computer system.
A measure of processor utilization may be based on a metering scheme that determines when a processor is in use. Such metering of processor utilization is currently accomplished by software running within the computer system's operating system. In a computer system having hardware that may be partitioned, gathering processor utilization data from a hardware system requires communications between the metering application and all operating systems running within the hardware. The need for communication with different operating systems poses significant challenges because operating systems by their design are separated from other operating systems and do not have visibility to utilization data from other operating systems. Furthermore, the way partitioned systems are deployed, network connectivity may not be possible between different operating systems on the same hardware, further complicating the ability to accurately measure processor utilization. Current solutions involve communicating with each operating system independently, and then aggregating the information at a later time. This solution may be troublesome when network access is restricted, agent software is not installed, and operating systems are temporarily out of service, for example. This solution also requires the development of operating system-specific agents because each partition is capable of running different instances of the operating systems. In particular, since operating systems within a partionable computer system do not, by default, communicate with each other, data providers (software agents) are needed to run on each operating system to collect and transmit, or otherwise provide utilization data from each partition. The thus-collected utilization data are aggregated to provide an overall value for processor utilization.